The present invention relates to an office communications system for the manipulation of image text data over a telephone network and including a word processing terminal and a telecopier.
Modern office communications systems include a word processing terminal and a telecopier. Each device per se is connected via a communications interface to a communications network. This communications network may be an intraoffice or public data network or the known telephone network.
The word processing terminal serves to manipulate, send out and receive text data known, for example, as telexes. The terminal includes a monitor for displaying the pages of text received or to be sent out, a storage medium, e.g. a diskette, for storing the text data, a keyboard for text input, and a microprocessor which controls the operating sequences of the word processing terminal.
To send out text data, the pages of text are fed into the word processing terminal by means of the keyboard, are stored by the storage medium and are simultaneously displayed on the monitor so that manipulations, such as reformulation, repositioning or corrections, in the text are possible at any time before send-out.
If the text has been processed in the desired manner, which can be ascertained on the monitor, the text data can be sent out through the communications interface.
For the receipt of text data, such data are entered into the storage medium of the word processing terminal and are displayed on the monitor simultaneously or upon completion of storage. From there the transmitted text data can be read out, if required, by means of a printer.
Pictures, such as, for example, drawings, are received or sent out by the telecopier or facsimile device. For this purpose, the document is inserted into an input/output unit and is scanned there automatically. The resulting uncompressed image data are sent out by a coder, preferably in the form of compressed picture data, via the communications interface.
When receiving picture data, these pass through a decoder which converts the received compressed picture data to the original image data and transfers them to the input/output unit for reconstruction.
If pages covered by typing or printing are to be transmitted, the prior art systems offer two possibilities: either feed the text manually into the word processing terminal via the keyboard or transmit the text as picture data via the telecopier.
The first process is very costly with respect to wages and time, and the second process, when compared with text transmission by means of the word processing terminal, is very costly.